Seamus Heaney and Contemporary Elegy

Huiwen Shi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781003864318
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040668276
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Seamus Heaney and Contemporary Elegy is the first book to examine Seamus Heaney's engagements, experiments, and revisions of the elegy as a major lyric genre. Through interpreting the elegiac work of Seamus Heaney, one of the largest single bodies of contemporary lyric elegy, this book proposes a major shift of attention: away from the subject and toward the elegiac object. The author develops a new critical perspective, ultimately leading to the transformation of the object into a subject and emphasizing elegiac landscapes of increasing interrelation. Through close prosodic attention, this book demonstrates how Heaney's work shifts contemporary discourse on the elegiac; first-person lyrical perspectives; and ethical action rooted in elegiac embarrassment. This major historical shift in elegiac ecosystems revises or redresses the tropes of First World War poetry, reshapes the elegiac form and space, and reworks the relationship between human and nonhuman. Postgraduate students and scholars of English, Cultural Studies, and Irish Studies will find this a useful and interesting addition to the field on Heaney and Irish Literature as a whole.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Ethics and Elegy
• 1 Barely Elegies: Heaneyʼs Acts of Redress in War Poetry
• 2 Spatial Embarrassment: Straining the Elegiac Sonnets
• 3 Terza Rima Elegies and Spatial Expansion
• 4 ‘Failed’ Elegies: The Nonhuman, the Bog Bodies Poems, and the ‘Intransitive’ Ecological Elegy
• Conclusion: Heaney and Beyond
• Bibliography
• Index